Both adjustable and non-adjustable hand-held ice skate blade sharpeners are known. For an example of such sharpeners, see U.S. Pat. No. 4,910,923 to McCabe, U.S. Pat. No. 4,908,994 to Fraser and U.S. Pat. No. 4,815,240 to Larson. Such sharpeners have removable or fixed grinding surfaces at the bottom of a movable or fixed gap or opening formed by solid side pieces.
One of the disadvantages inherent in the design of these known sharpeners is that the width of the gap cannot be easily or correctly adjusted for the many and varied blade widths of existing ice skates which are available. The result is that the sharpener will either not fit a skate blade properly or it will tend to rock excessively from side to side as the sharpener is moved back and forth along thin blades.
A second disadvantage is that the grinding surfaces of the known sharpeners are not flexible and are either difficult or impossible to rotate or replace once they become worn, which can be quite rapid.
A further important disadvantage inherent in the design of the known sharpeners is that they are intended for a few ice skate models only, which not only may also have varying widths per se, but also have concave ground blades differing from other skates. Figure skates, for example, have wider, shallower ground blades. Modern long-distance skates such as the kind worn on ski boots, on the other hand, are not concave ground at all and have blades as narrow as 1.4 mm. The grinding device must therefore be either replaceable or adjustable for many different skates, or both.